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Call for papers Yearbook of Women’s History 2018

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Building bodies: Gendered Sport and Transnational Movements

Guest editor: Marjet Derks

The thrilling European title for the Dutch women’s football team, a pregnant Serena Williams winning the Australian Open tennis tournament, Kenyan-born Rose Chelimo of Bahrain becoming World Champion of the women’s marathon, and 66-year-old Pat Gallant-Charette being the oldest woman to swim across the English Channel – these are only recent highlights of female achievements in sport. In all respects, women’s sport participation and success is booming. In addition, ‘fitgirls’ have become part of popular culture. The 2018 volume of the Yearbook of Women’s History will focus on the making of ‘the sporting body’ as a concept full of ambiguous cultural meanings and impact. Marjet Derks, Professor of Sports History at Radboud University Nijmegen, will serve as guest editor for this volume, which will appear in the year of the 2018 Winter Olympics.

Traditionally, sport has been a masculine domain dominated by men and capacities that have culturally been ascribed to them. ‘The athlete’ was a competitive and if necessary an aggressive achiever and had outstanding physical prowess. Sport participation by women was never perceived as natural, but rather as an act of border crossing or even space invading that transgressed gender and sexual naturalness. For that reason, it was met with prejudice and oppression.

For a long time, sports history reflected this male dominance. Even though magazines gradually began to address sport as a pastime from the late nineteenth century, academic interest only became more prominent in the late twentieth century, when historical analysis began to address sport as a thoroughly gendered field (Bourdieu). Starting with the role of female pioneers and their self-empowering experiences through sport, research has expanded towards analysis of sport as a basically gendered performative culture, in which gender (femininity, masculinity and transgenderism) is done, affirmed and challenged. Moreover, questions have arisen as to how issues of gender have changed sport. More recently, the intersectional dynamics of sports have come to the fore, together with a focus on transnational discourses, representations and practices.

The 2018 Yearbook of Women’s History invites papers which discuss the historical formation, transformation and impact of gendered discourses, representations and practices within sport and physical culture. The focus will be international and comparative. We welcome contributions that consider the Netherlands (or former Dutch colonies), as well as other parts of the world, in a transnational analysis.